California may not be the sharkiest place on earth, but it’s not not sharky.
Specifically, in the southern reaches of the state, juvenile great whites flourish, crowding surf lineups in the summertime for the ample supply of their preferred food of fish, pinnipeds, and sting rays; then, up north, the real big great whites hang out.
And Cal State University Long Beach’s Shark Lab is one of the foremost researchers in the local shark space. But, unfortunately, the Lab is losing funding.
"It's getting pretty serious," Shark Lab director Chris Lowe told ABC7. "We have enough money to carry us through June but after that, if we don't get more funding, we're going to have to pull out all of the equipment out of the water. We won't be able to monitor sharks along California anymore."
The price tag to keep the lights on? $7 mill.
Currently, Lowe and the rest of his team are working to source the funds through “private and nonprofit sources,” but if they don’t, that could spell trouble for California surfers and swimmers. That’s because, the Shark Lab operates buoys and detectors in the ocean, which monitor marine activity, and can notify lifeguards when a shark gets close to shore. For more on that, check out this nifty infographic.
"Everything that we learned from our science gets out to the public, and this is unique," Lowe added. "It's considered one of the best shark mitigation programs in the world."
Last June, the Shark Lab published a study with some staggering data – it showed that, at some southern California beaches, juvenile great white sharks were sharing the lineup with surfers 97% of the time. But here’s the rub: there were no attacks.
So, for Lowe, that was confirmation that the pervasive fear-mongering surrounding sharks was unwarranted. “We never expected to see so many encounters every day with no incidents,” he commented following the study’s release.
But if the Shark Lab loses funding, studies like this – and the realtime shark activity monitoring – will cease to exist. More on this as it develops.
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